About this project
This site publishes the Jewish metrical books of Brzostek (Brzostek Jewish community, Galicia), covering births, deaths, and marriages from 1894 through 1938. Page-scans of the original books were transcribed and matched against a single reconciled person index. The site is a static build — every page is just HTML, JSON, and JPGs that anyone can host on a free service such as GitHub Pages, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages.
More about Brzostek
- A Town Called Brzostek — documentary about the town, watch on demand at Vimeo.
- Brzostek at JRI-Poland — Jewish Records Indexing – Poland's town page.
- A visit in a town called Brzostek — blog post by the Galicia Jewish Heritage Institute interns after a 2020 visit.
- Brzostek on Wikipedia — general town history.
- Genealogia w Archiwach — the Polish State Archives' genealogy portal (English interface). Brzostek's books haven't been published there yet.
- History of the Brzostek Jewish community — from Virtual Shtetl (POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews).
- Mark Schonwetter: Stories Survive — interview with Mark Schonwetter, who grew up on a large farm outside Brzostek and survived the Holocaust as a child. He later co-wrote Together: A Journey of Survival with his daughter. From the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (New York).
Sources
- Brzostek birth book, 1894–1938. 723 records, 216 page-scans.
- Brzostek death book, 1894–1938. 445 records, 161 page-scans.
- Brzostek marriage book, 1894–1938. 279 records, 150 page-scans.
Methodology
Every record was transcribed from the original page-scan into a
spreadsheet (one workbook per book). Names were normalized for an
English-speaking audience. Names fall into a two-tier system —
"legal" (the form that would have been seen as legal in Vienna) and
"common" (the form the family used on an everyday basis at home). A
single Person Index reconciles duplicates across books: each unique
person is assigned a Person_ID (P0001, P0002,
…), and every record's role columns reference those IDs. Where
two record entries clearly refer to the same person, the duplicate row
is RETIRED (kept as a tombstone only) and merged into the canonical
row. Only CONFIRMED rows are published here.
Inline name links
Inside each record's transcription, names are rendered as clickable links to the corresponding person page. The link engine is conservative: it only considers people the structured columns of that record already identify, never strangers from elsewhere in the corpus. When a name in the prose cannot be confidently linked, the small "People in this record" panel beside the transcription still names the person and links to their page; entries that the inline pass missed are tagged "linked here only".
Corrections
Each record page and each person page has a "Submit a correction" link. The link opens a new issue on the project's GitHub repository with a pre-filled template — the page reference and a blank "what's wrong / what should it say" form. A free GitHub account is required to submit. No email address is collected, and no contact information is exposed on the site. The owner reviews each submission, edits the underlying spreadsheet if appropriate, and re-runs the build to apply the correction.
Privacy
This site has no analytics, no cookies, and no third-party trackers. The only external resources it loads are MiniSearch and Chart.js from public CDNs — both static JavaScript libraries, both delivered without user data. Corrections are routed through GitHub Issues; submission content and the submitter's GitHub username become part of the public issue thread.
Credits
Translation, transcription, and reconciliation: project team. Page-scans contributed by descendants and researchers. Site build by the project's static-site pipeline.